Although this year has not panned out the way we had expected, Deans House showed great involvement and enthusiasm especially at the beginning of the year when things were a bit more normal.

We were lucky enough to have had a great term 1 and 2 celebrating house spirit in major events like Athletics Day and Lipsync which showed great success! Despite the fact that several inconveniences occurred this year including a lockdown in term 3, Dean's house students showed a level of leadership and perseverance, bringing a positive attitude and keenness to house events throughout the year, allowing themselves to create as many opportunities for themselves and for us as a house! This made being head of Dean’s house very enjoyable and fun and I have loved every minute of helping lift the house spirit throughout the school and meet many awesome students!

From here myself and my deputy head of house, Abbey Loffhagen came together to form an amazing house committee where we aimed to create a strong, close-knit and welcoming group of students where we could brainstorm ideas on how we, as a house, could improve our house atmosphere. We met fortnightly, putting in our own individual ideas and then discussing them to find a neutral agreement. I found personally that having a house committee was very practical and beneficial to the betterment of improving our house spirit and to add, helped me as a leader have a more selected group of people that were willing to put themselves out there.

We started 2021 with a bang, excited and curious to know how the year would turn out, hoping for a more fortunate outcome compared to last year! Many of the students in Dean's house were super excited and showed elevated spirits, where many students were eager to participate and help out with any house activities that were up and coming. The rudimentary activities that allowed us as a house to grow together were seen at Athletics Day at Nai Puna Wai and at Swimming sports! Athletics Day was a huge success where many of the Dean’s House students showed a lot of competitiveness and enthusiasm towards the several events that were displayed throughout the day and it was awesome to see that everyone was willing to get involved in events and show their house spirit. These house events really benefited me as a leader as I was able to make new connections with students from across the school levels, and to add, helped me feel a lot more comfortable in my new role! It enabled me to feel as though I was supported and optimistic with future plans and ideas as well as made me as a house leader feel as though our goal of achieving better house spirit was attainable.

Term 2 came around very quickly, where our sole focus was to prepare the Lip Sync event that was held at Christchurch Boys’ High School on the 25th of June. I think, speaking on behalf of all of the house leaders this year, we can all agree that we felt very honoured to have been able to have the opportunity to undertake lip sync after the provoking cancellation last year due to COVID-19. This became a positive environment for all of us as a school as we felt we needed to redeem ourselves from last year, in tribute to the house leaders that were unable to perform their lip sync show cases. Our theme this year was ‘decades’ where I was overwhelmed with the support shown from the rest of the house. Overall, we came 4th on the night, and in my humble opinion was a great effort seeing as we had a lot to accomplish in a short period of time! The commitment and passion shown at practices was awesome to see making me as the head of the house, very proud.

Overall, Dean’s House this year has been an amazing group of students that have shown great excitement and keenness to each and every one of the house events and it has been a great pleasure to have led the house! I think we can all agree that the situation currently with on-going COVID cases around New Zealand has made each and every day unpredictable meaning we really need to enjoy and take up any opportunity that comes our way and I can gladly say that we, as a house have shown this and presented great pride! I would like to especially thank Ms O’Connor for the on-going support and help when I found things difficult or tough, which goes unnoticed behind the scenes!

So, good luck to the Dean's house of 2022 next year and I look forward to seeing how everything turns out!